Google's recent move of revealing the Chrome OS to a suspecting public has put a great many people on alert. Some say it's a major privacy issue, some say Google oughtn't to become more and more monopolistic, while others think that the wide array of popular Linux distributions shouldn't become even more fragmented than it already is. "Google's decision to create its own Linux distribution and splinter the Linux community decisively once again can only be seen as foolhardy and self-obsessive.
Instead of treading its own path, Google should have sought to leverage the stellar work already carried out by Mark Shuttleworth and his band of merry coders and tied its horse to the Ubuntu cart."

"Sour grapes on the part of proponents of distros with a less realistic grasp on reality of what new users need to get started..."

This is pure BS. Ubuntu is the Microsoft of the GNU/Linux world. They will more than happily put closed source, proprietary drivers into the operating system to make the "user experience" better. *This* is why Ubuntu is popular. Not because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the easy thing to do.

This doesn't have anything to do with realistic grasps of reality at all. It has to due with the laziness of the Ubuntu user base and people in general.

Most of the crap that GNU/Linux takes flak for is not because of the desktop, not because of stability, but because it's hard to get those pieces of shite components that no one write documentation for or provides specifications for to work adequately at least not without that blob (Intel, Broadcomm, nVidia).

People install Ubuntu because these garbage binary blobs are provided as part of the *default install*. Oh yeah! It's a pandora's box of blob work, just look at the restricted drivers that are provided by default.

Making things easy is not necessarily always a good thing. I suppose it is depending on what side you are coming from, but Ubuntu is nearly a total 180% from what the GNU project and the GNU/Linux community set out to do many years ago.

Ubuntu is for the mindless and lazy. All software available for Ubuntu is also available for any other GNU/Linux distribution. Proponents that Ubuntu is the *ultimate* GNU/Linux distribution, screw it.. I'm just sick of it!